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The world has about 50,000 neurosurgeons, according to a recent count in the Journal of Neurosurgery, but there are only 1,500 chess grandmasters worldwide. 

Jerald Times, director of chess at a New York charter school network, uses the stats to show that being a chess grandmaster might not be as lucrative as brain surgery, but it is harder to achieve.

At least when it comes to the task of education, the historical record suggests that Johannes Gutenberg and Henry Ford probably had little in common. In fact, you might well have rejected either of them as a candidate for secretary of education.

But maybe we should look again. On one aspect of the educational enterprise, they operated from much the same philosophy. If there was something good and valuable for the population at large (books for Gutenberg, autos for Ford), there had to be a way to make it available to the masses at a decent cost.

I’ve raised the issue before in this space, but the continued collapse of our culture suggests it’s appropriate to mention it again.

Imagine for a few minutes, if you will, that you’re the manager of a local McDonald’s restaurant. For the third straight day, as you seek to reconcile your registers, your cash record is off. But now, as you reflect on what might be happening, and think about the various members of your youthful staff, you puzzle over a strange pair of possible explanations. Are you dealing with computational incompetence—or with day-to-day dishonesty?

“We’ll prepare you for life,” the colorful school brochure assured me, “the way it really is.”

It has become an educational shibboleth: “We’re here,” schools at every level claim, “to get you ready for the real world.”

But do they? If that’s a significant measure of a school’s success, a painful list of them deserve failing grades. For what many schools—both public and private—have to offer these days is an incredible distance from life the way most of us really live it.

A Connecticut middle-school moment:

On a reporting trip in Connecticut last week for a forthcoming story, I spent a morning in a seventh-grade classroom. The students were diligently finishing up a worksheet on a book they were reading together. Once they turned in their sheets, the teacher set aside time for them to read the local newspaper—the print edition! The teacher has them regularly write reports on newspaper articles.

Robin Prather, a retired children’s librarian in Oregon and a Christian, volunteers at a school library in the district where she used to work. A fellow librarian pointed out a title to her in an upcoming popular reading competition for third- through fifth-graders: George by Alex Gino.

Emily Curran expects opposition for her pro-life beliefs.

Her parents started taking her to prayer vigils outside abortion centers when she was a child, and she witnessed firsthand the vitriol abortion supporters sometimes hurl at people pleading for the lives of unborn babies. But that didn’t make it any easier to face the same kind of ridicule and derision in her own high-school cafeteria.